THE LEOPARD MAN

A black leopard escapes into the night, a small New Mexico town grows frightened, and Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur have everything they need. Adapted from Cornell Woolrich’s Black Alibi and given its wonderfully lurid title by RKO in the wake of CAT PEOPLE, THE LEOPARD MAN turns a simple pulp premise into one of the strangest and most beautifully controlled thrillers of the 1940s—a movie built from darkness, sound, chance and the fear of being alone at exactly the wrong moment.

The final collaboration between Lewton and Tourneur keeps wandering away from the path a conventional mystery might take, following the nighttime life of the town with an almost dreamlike freedom. Ordinary errands and encounters acquire an inexplicable tension. Wind moves through empty streets. Water drips beneath a railroad trestle. Castanets click somewhere in the darkness. Tourneur and cinematographer Robert De Grasse fill the screen with pools of black so deep that simply waiting to discover what might emerge from them becomes almost unbearable, while the soundtrack makes every footstep and distant noise feel potentially significant.

At barely over an hour, THE LEOPARD MAN is lean enough to qualify as pure pulp and strange enough to continually escape its own premise. Beneath the mystery runs the fatalism of Woolrich and Lewton’s fascination with ordinary lives brushing unexpectedly against the unknown, all expressed through filmmaking of extraordinary economy and precision. Manny Farber was already championing it as one of Hollywood’s “original gems” in the early 1950s, and its nocturnal spell has only grown stronger with time. A street, a shadow, a sound in the distance: few horror films have ever needed less to make the darkness feel dangerous.